It's often said that less is more, and the restaurant industry has taken this literally with a flurry of single and dual dish restaurants opening lately. Like the trend for shorter wine lists, menus are becoming pared down with just a handful of options. But are simple menus here to stay? Or are these restaurants just one, or two, hit wonders?

Dual dish restaurants are having a bit of a moment right now. The folk behind Goodman opened Burger & Lobster in December last year to rapturous reviews from London's bloggers. The restaurant keeps it simple with just three options - a burger served bloody, a whole lobster and a lobster roll.

Former Ledbury chef James Knappett will launch Bubbledogs, an unorthodox marriage of hotdogs and champagne, in July. The menu is slightly longer, with 10 dishes on it, but still restrained by most standards. Head west to Bristol and you'll find a more traditional combination of craft beer and pizza at Beerd, where the beer list is considerably longer than the pizza menu. And back in London, Mark Hix is soon to open The Tramshed, a Shoreditch hangout with a no-fuss menu of chicken and steak.

Some restaurants go one step further and specialise in a single dish or ingredient. There Soho's aptly named Madd, which serves only mango based dishes, and the slightly less eccentric Meatballs in Clerkenwell, which sells, yes, you've guessed it, meatballs. Leeds has Primo's Gourmet Hotdogs, which dishes up nine variations on the sausage theme. Taking it to the extreme is Le Relais de Venise in Manchester or London, which has a grand total of one dish on the menu. Well I suppose you can't go wrong with steak and chips.

The trend for single dish joints originated in New York (don't they all?). From macaroni cheese to fries to rice pudding, if you can think of a comfort food, there's a New York restaurant for it. And if the queues are anything to go by, niche restaurants are doing very well on these shores too.

Putting all your eggs in one basket isn't without its pitfalls though. As Jay Rayner pointed out in his review of risotto bar Ooze, if you do only one thing you need to do it well. With a lone dish on the menu there's no hiding if it's not up to scratch. If you're not a jack of all trades then you need to be master of one.

Assuming a restaurant does excel at the dishes it sells, a simple menu should make life easy for the diner. Research by Columbia & Stanford universities suggests giving a consumer too many options means they fail to make a decision at all. Simple menus with few choices make dining straightforward. That's as long as you can decide which of the many niche restaurants to go to in the first place.

Simpler menus bring benefits for the restaurants too, with potential for less waste. This is something Gordon Ramsay was always banging on about in Kitchen Nightmares. It can only be a good thing for both the environment. And of course the restaurateur's pocket.

I can't help thinking that churning out the same old dishes must get boring for the chefs though. And these no-fuss menus bore me too. I like to turn up at a restaurant and choose what to eat as the mood takes me. In fact, I love specials, even though I know half the time it's just the chef using up leftovers. There won't be too many surprises if I have dinner at Meatballs. And what happens if I fancy a hotdog but my friend wants a burger?

Ultimately the buzz around niche restaurants tells us that plenty of people love these one trick ponies. But once the dust settles, will we still be standing in line for a lobster roll?

What do you think? Are specialised restaurants just a gimmick? Or does a narrow focus mean a better executed dish? Do you prefer a stripped down menu, or is more more?